Ghada Oueiss accuses UAE of hacking her phone and inciting against her
Al Jazeera’s news broadcaster, Ghada Owais, accused the UAE and its ally, Saudi Arabia, of hacking her personal phone and inciting against her in a disgraceful way through social media.
“The scum of the Emirati and Saudi regimes hacked my phone and paid an amount that was to provide for a refugee family for a year,” Owais said on Twitter.
“You scum, I am ready to give you my phone with all the pictures, that honor all of your ancestry, all my emails, my conversations, and calls, and whatever fabrications you want, but stop your war on the children of Yemen!”
In this context, Owais published an article in the American newspaper Washington Post about her phone being hacked.
“Though I’ve worked as a journalist in the Middle East for 20 years and learned how to deal with the challenges of being a woman in the field, I had never seen anything like this before. What I read made me angry, shocked and scared.
“Private photos of me in a swimsuit had been stolen from my phone and posted on Twitter with offensive, misogynistic and false claims that the photos were taken at the private residence of Al Jazeera Media Network’s Qatari chairman, Sheikh Hamad Bin Thamer Al-Thani. I watched aghast as the number of retweets increased by the hundreds each minute.
“Within just a few hours, photos of me in a hot tub — some of them pixelated to make people believe, incorrectly, that I was nude — were tweeted more than 40,000 times.
“This was not the first time that I had been subjected to cyberbullying or a coordinated campaign against me on social media. But this time, it appeared the attackers had hacked my phone
“Just days later, reports emerged that Saudi dissident Omar Abdulaziz had received new warnings from the Canadian police that he was under threat.
“Almost all of the accounts abusing me displayed the Saudi flag, a picture of MBS, as the Saudi crown prince is often known, or a photograph of Abu Dhabi’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed. Saudi and Emirati public figures, including Dhahi Khalfan, former head of Dubai Police; Naif Al-Asaker, a mufti at the Saudi Ministry of Islamic Affairs and a close ally to MBS; and Hamad Al-Mazroui, a close associate of the UAE crown prince, amplified these posts, which led to ordinary Saudis and Emiratis joining the assault.
“Although I was the target of this latest assault — no doubt because I regularly present critical reporting about Saudi Arabia and the UAE — the message to journalists across the Middle East is very clear: Don’t criticize the crown princes.
“For these people, it seemed incomprehensible that a woman could be successful based on her merit or hard work. After all, as far as their governments are concerned, women should be seen but not heard — unless they occupy token positions to demonstrate a facade of modernity and can be paraded in front of the world’s media.
“There has been a disturbing rise in gender-related harassment and threats against female public figures. The movement for women’s rights in Saudi Arabia has terrified the government, which has insisted on doling out reforms on its own terms while detaining the female activists behind the movement. Loujain al-Hathloul, the most prominent of the Saudi women campaigners, and several others remain behind bars.”
Owais called on Twitter and other social media platforms to take measures to protect journalists and ensure that they are not being misused by authoritarian regimes.
